Safrak Bank: organization which rules the Safrak Islands of the Swelaway Sea. Its ostensible business is to fatten on trade passing between Port Domax and the heartland of Tameran.
Guest Gulkan's birthday was in spring, and it was in spring of Alliance 4305 that he turned 15. His birthday was ill-omened, for it found him afflicted by influenza.
While leprosy, cholera and bubonic plague have names to rival nightmare, for swift and sudden devastation nothing can match the more lethal strains of influenza. This epidemic had claimed a tenth of Safrak's population in barely thirty days, and looked fit to claim Guest as well. He was fevered and awash with sweat, so weak in his ague's anguish that he lacked the strength to crack a flee.
In the end, the boy only survived because a guardian named Hrothgar took him home to his wife Una, who had just lost her baby to the epidemic, and so was able to wetnurse the patient. Guest was far too sick to derive any erotic satisfaction from this privilege, but Una's help saw him through his crisis, and shortly he was tottering around in the spring sunshine, feeling more like a ghost of himself than an actual boy of flesh and blood.
"You're no ghost," said Una, pulling on one of his big ears.
"There's no ghost here! There's an elephant!" Guest, who had begun to grow infatuated with the gray-eyed Una, promptly lost all sympathy with the woman. If there was one thing the young Weaponmaster absolutely hated, it was a woman who pulled on his ears. And, sooner or later, every woman of his acquaintance seemed to end up doing exactly that. Those ears, it seemed, had a fatal attraction for the entire female sex.
With his infatuation thus abruptly terminated, Guest was glad to flee from Hrothgar's house – a ramshackle wooden building in the ramshackle city of Molothair – and return to his own quarters in the mainrock Pinnacle.
On his return to the mainrock, he was promptly nobbled for guard duty. He was weak in the aftermath of his sickness, but weakness was no disqualification for work at such a time. Guest Gulkan was technically resident upon Alozay as a hostage, but this was a mere legalism. The Safrak Bank trusted him – as much as it trusted any boy of 15 – and so readily employed his brutality. It set him to guard the time prison, a large hall with a series of transparent pods set around its walls.
Mark the layout of the Hall of Time!
The mainrock Pinnacle stands at the northern end of the long and narrow island of Alozay. It is a mighty upthrust of granite, a misshapen tube of rock which bulbs outward at its middlemost point.
To win admission to the mainrock, one must come to its docks, which lie in the cold and guttural shadows of the mainrock's wave-slapped northern shore. One is then hauled upwards to Gud Obo, the Winch Stratum, the lowest of the seven inhabited levels of the mainrock. Gud Obo houses the winch-works, the servant quarters, and the storerooms.
Multiple stairways connect Gud Obo with Dolce Obo, the Pillow Stratum. This is given over to the business of life, for it is a place of sleeping quarters, kitchens and eateries; and here one finds the mainrock's banqueting hall. Here Guest Gulkan and Sken-Pitilkin had their customary quarters, and a classroom in which they could prosecute the dissection of the irregular verbs.
A dozen stairways climb from Dolce Obo to Inic Obo, the Quill Stratum, which is given over to the offices of the Safrak Bank. A mighty stratum, this, for it dominates the bulbing middlemost girthswell of the mainrock Pinnacle.
Yet another dozen stairways lead upward to Brondon Obo, the Steel Stratum, the fourth level of the mainrock, which houses prisons, guardhouse and armories.
By now, the mainrock is starting to taper as it buffets upward toward the rough-hewn ridge which helmets its crest. In consequence of the tapering, only four stairways lead upward from the fourth level to the fifth, from Brondon Obo to Trilip Obo, the Archive Stratum.
The Archive Stratum is just that – dead rooms of silent paper, of ancient book-chests sealed with lead. As one goes upward in the mainrock, so the labor of supplying water from below becomes greater, and for this reason Trilip Obo was uninhabited by human flesh.
Only one stairway climbs upward from Trilip Obo to Zi Obo, the Pod Stratum, the sixth level of the mainrock Pinnacle. Zi Obo holds one single and solitary chamber, an oval hall a hundred paces in length and three dozen paces in width. This chamber is the Hall of Time, and it was in this hall that Guest Gulkan was to stand guard duty.
The single stairway from below enters the Hall of Time at its western end. From there, the hall stretches away for its full length of a hundred paces to the ascending stairway at its eastern end. When Guest was brought there to do guard duty, the entrance to that ascending stairway was guarded by a monumental block of jade-green stone.
"So," said Banker Sod, who had taken it upon himself to brief Guest Gulkan on his guard duties. "Where are we?" Guest looked around.
"We are in the Hall of Time," said Guest Gulkan, who had received a guided tour of the mainrock shortly after his first arrival on Alozay, and who remembered this room well. Set in niches around its northern and southern walls were many transparent pods, some empty, others holding Safrak's time prisoners. Between the niches were deep-cut slit windows, the northern ones looking out across the Swelaway Sea, the southern ones allowing a partial view of the longstretch of Alozay and the ramshackle city of Molothair.
"Which level is this?" said Sod.
"The fifth," said Guest. "No, the sixth, that's it. The sixth. There's one more. The seventh."
"Jezel Obo," said Sod, naming it. "The Sky Stratum. What lies in the sky, boy?"
"It is a sacred place," said Guest. "A shrine denied to all but the initiated. It's called, uh, a sanctum. The Inner Sanctum."
"That is so," said Sod. "Jezel Obo, the Sky Stratum, is the site of the Inner Sanctum, the holy of holies of the Safrak Bank.
Are you a priest, boy?"
"No," said Guest.
"Do you have any ambition to be a priest?"
"No."
"Then don't worry your head about sacred places. Understood?"
"Understood," said Guest, who, thanks to his studies in ethnology with Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin, knew that many peoples did not like to have the secrets of their faith questioned.
"Well then," said Sod, "if that's understood, then let us go and meet the demon."
With that, Banker Sod led the Yarglat barbarian Guest Gulkan from the western end of the Hall of Time to the stairway at its eastern end.
It was then evening, and the light was dying in the Hall of Time. Sod and Guest cast no shadows as they walked through that gray light toward the jade-green block of stone at the far end of the hall. Their boots clicked over the skull-pattern tiles – many of which were broken – which paved the native granite of the hall.
The roof was high above, and the sound of their boots was cold and sharp in the vaulting emptiness.
An odd pair they made, for Banker Sod, the Governor of the Safrak Bank, was a pale-skinned male of iceman race, with the black fingernails and thick white bodyhair so typical of that breed. His hair was bright gold, his eyes yellow and his teeth of like color.
Upon Sod's ringfinger there was a steel ring in which there was set a gemstone. That stone was of ever-ice, and in the gathering gloom of evening a ghost-cloud of light surrounded it. Guest knew that chipstone of ever-ice to be the key which opened and closed the pods of the time prison.
They halted at the eastern end of the Hall of Time. They halted in the presence of the hall's resident demon – the jade- green block of stone which guarded the single stairway which led upwards to the seventh and highest level of the mainrock Pinnacle.
Though Sod was accustomed to do business in the Galish Trading Tongue, and though Guest had learnt Galish from Sken Pitilkin, the language of the briefing was Guest's native tongue, the Eparget of the Yarglat, in which Sod was uncommonly fluent.
Apparently the demon understood the same language, for Sod still spoke in Eparget when addressing that dignitary directly.
"Iva-Italis," said Banker Sod. "This is Guest Gulkan, the son of the emperor of Tameran, and a student of the wizard Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin."
The demon received this news in silence. It was a monolithic block of green stone which was twice Guest Gulkan's height; and, like the other rocks of the world, it seemed singularly indisposed to entertaining mere humans in conversation.
"Does the demon speak?" said Guest.
"When it chooses to," said Sod. "It is the head of our force of mercenaries, those men who belong to that body we call the Guardians. If you were to join the Guardians then Iva-Italis would be your master."
"Ha-hmm," said Guest, pretending that this was new to him, and that he was absorbing this information with the greatest of interest.
In fact, Guest already knew all about Safrak's Guardians, the Toxteth-speaking mercenaries recruited from Port Domax and Wen Endex. Guest had even struck up a dice-and-beer friendship with some few of those worthy warriors – most notably the mighty Hrothgar – and had a little of their native argot at the command of his tongue. Surely Banker Sod had been appraised of the development of these relationships – but, if so, then the rigors of influenza had stripped that knowledge from the Banker's mind.
"Iva-Italis guards these stairs," said Banker Sod, continuing his lecture about Safrak's guardian demon. "No unauthorized person can come up or down the stairway – and that means you. If any unauthorized person tries to pass, then the demon will eat them."
"Eat them?" said Guest. "But it has no mouth, and – well, claws, arms, tentacles, things to grab with. Besides, the stairs are wide."
"When it eats, it eats," said Sod. "So don't worry about the stairs. The time prison is your concern. You know about it?"
"I know," said Guest, who had heard all about Safrak's time prison.
"Very well," said Sod, obviously relieved that he did not have to explain. "Your duty is simple. If anyone tries to interfere with the time prisoners, then you kill them."
"How could anyone interfere?" said Guest, who knew very well that there was but one ring which could free the time prisoners from their pods, and that that ring was ever in Banker Sod's possession.
"They could interfere," said Banker Sod, "by trying to physically carry away one of the prison pods. They could – never mind. If something goes wrong, Iva-Italis will tell you who to kill and when."
Banker Sod was in no mood for extended explanations because he was even sicker than Guest Gulkan. Yet there was more to do before Sod could depart. He had to accompany Guest Gulkan back to the head of the western stairway, and point out the things placed in niches in the western wall.
"Lanterns," said Sod. "They must be filled with this oil.
There is a bracket by each and every time pod. Light as many lanterns as you need. You can use a tinder box, I suppose."
"I have never mastered such a device," said Guest, lying through his teeth.
A tinder box is a tricky thing to use, and by pleading ignorance Guest Gulkan got Sod to conjure the first lantern into life.
Then Sod picked up a rod of hardwood. A dozen short lengths of chain dangled from the rod, and each chain ended in a barbed hook.
"What is this?" said Sod. Guest squinted at the thing, then declared it to be an instrument of torture, or perhaps some device designed to be used in a fishing boat.
"No!" said Sod. "It is a bablobrokmadorni stick."
"A – a bab – baba – bablob?"
"A bablobrokmadorni stick," said Sod. "I thought you were a scholar!"
"Well," said Guest. "I study."
"But obviously not hard enough," said Sod. "For a command of the Janjuladoola seems to be lacking from your tongue."
"It is so," conceded Guest.
"Then learn at least a word of it," said Sod. "This is a bablobrokmadorni stick, a device used in the Izdimir Empire for the carriage of lanterns. Look! You can put it on your shoulder and carry six lanterns without a risk of fire."
"A lantern stick, then," said Guest, making no attempt to pronounce the Janjuladoola name of the thing, since he feared that any such exercise in applied linguistics would precipitate the rupture of his jaw.
Then Sod showed him the water jug, which was half-full. The bread box, which held some lumps of black peasant bread so hard they could have been used as missiles for a catapult. The chamber pot – which was unclean, and smelt accordingly.
"Empty it from that northern window," said Sod, gesturing at the nearest slit window. "You'll find it by its smell, even if you can't find it otherwise."
With these instructions given, Sod warned Guest not to leave his post before he was relieved at dawn. Then the Banker took himself off to his bed, descending the darkened stairs without bothering himself with a light – for Sod knew every shadow in the mainrock by its heights, its depth, its heat, its cold, its timbre or its smell.
Once left alone, Guest immediately busied himself with the lighting of lanterns. The boy Guest was not zealously industrious by nature, but night was setting in. The ominous darkness – scarcely relieved by the cold green glow which emanated from the distant flanks of the demon Icaria Scaria Iva-Italis – beset the boy with fears. This was a high place, a cold place, a barren place, and he did not like it.
Lanterns swayed from the chains of the bablobrokmadorni stick, sending a dozen shadows of Guest Gulkan lurching across the skull-pattern tiles of the Hall of Time. When hung by the time pods, they seemed merely to enlarge the darkness rather than to light the hall. The unlit gulf of the western staircase became a funnel descending into the nether depths, and Guest, made uneasy by that plunging chasm of blackness, placed his armchair up against the northern wall.
Yet even with the armchair so placed, Guest found it impossible to settle. Instead, he began to perambulate around the room, checking the oil levels in the lanterns, testing the room's acoustics by hawking and spitting, and amusing himself by examining the people so firmly frozen in the timestasis of the pods of the time prison. A motley bunch they were, those prisoners, a good many of them showing signs of extreme age, of disease, or of wounds or torture.
Rumor claimed – and Guest had heard the rumor, for ears as big as his were singularly well adapted for the capture of gossip – that time prisoners almost inevitably died upon release. The process of being frozen within a block of unchanging time was held to be harmless in itself, but the psychic shock of being displaced from one's own time by days, years or generations was held to be inevitably fatal.
Hence the Safrak Bank used the time pods as instruments of execution. After two or three generations of incarceration, a prisoner would be abruptly released into a future in which friends, lovers and relatives were dead, or reduced to decrepit spiderwebbed ghosts of their former selves, old-aged skeletons thinly cloaked by arthritic mottlestone flesh. From the prisoner's point of view, an eyeblink aged the world. The shock of such change was sufficient to kill – though one rumor claimed that a quick-acting poison was covertly administered to supplement that shock. Guest Gulkan, growing disturbed by the unblinking stares of those imprisoned in the time pods, ceased his scrutiny of the same. Though the hall was very large, it was nevertheless becoming increasingly claustrophobic. The shadows weighed heavily on Guest Gulkan's shoulders. He topped up the oil in each and every lantern, and trimmed the wicks to maxi mise their light-producing efficiency, yet the heavy burden of shadow seemed scarcely relieved.
As if seeking escape from the hall, Guest Gulkan eased himself into a north-facing slit window. It was easily tall enough to accommodate his height, but narrowed sharply, its sides arrowheading inward as the window pierced its way through the wall to the outer air. The outermost aperture of this defensive fenestra was just large enough for Guest to stick his head outside. He did so. He warped his head around to look up at the sharp-slash stars, then looked down at the sightless gulfs of the Swelaway Sea far below.
"Sa!" said Guest, pulling his head in, then rubbing his ears to warm them against the cold.
The young Yarglat barbarian jumped down from the slit window and returned to his armchair. But it was growing increasingly cold – far too cold for him to stay seated slumped and sleep. So he resumed his perambulations. Guest was far from the demon when he heard someone coming down the stairs. Guest geared himself up for action instantly. His blood began to pulse in his ears. A warm flush of battle-readiness surged through his body. Then – then Guest belatedly remembered that the stairs were not his concern. The stairs were guarded by the demon, or so Banker Sod most earnestly believed, and the guardianship of those stairs was the demon's concern, with Guest Gulkan's duty being merely to prevent interference with the prisoners of the time prison.
Down came a single person, who paused by the demon, who spoke – or appeared to speak, for Guest heard the whispering ghost of a comment across a distance greater than eighty paces – then tramped toward the downward stairway in the west.
Resting on the stranger's left shoulder was a bablobrokmadorni stick from which two lanterns depended, and these lit him as he approached. A remarkable figure! He was dressed in brightly-colored patchwork motley. A multitude of small ceramic animals were attacked to his trousers and his jacket. On his feet were slippers, which curved upward at the toes, terminating in pink pom-poms. He wore a golden skullcap fringed with tiny glass bells, which rang out in a rain of music as he stepped lightly, briskly, across the cracked and broken tiles of the Hall of Time.
A bright and briskful figure, this.
But the face!
As the man drew near, Guest Gulkan saw his face was hideously disfigured by burns. Twisted welts and lava-field fluxes had warped that face until its age and race were beyond determination.
On his right hand, the man wore a glove puppet in the form of a green-skinned dragon with red dewlaps. As he drew level with Guest, the man's right hand moved. The dragon snapped at Guest's ear. And it had teeth! Yes, there were miniature teeth built into the mouth of the glove puppet, teeth sharp as razors! Guest's hand went to his sword.
But the stranger laughed, laughed like a bell, laughed with such penetrating clarity that one might imagine him to be heard from one side of the Swelaway Sea to another. He had a singer's voice, trained to carry, and the laugh was a song of sorts, so penetrating that Guest felt its vibrations in his bones.
Disarmed and made dumbstruck by that laugh, Guest stood like a scarecrow, gawking at the stranger. Who sniffed him. Smelt him.
Sucked sweat, dust and dinner into his nostrils. Sampled him.
Memorized him. Then snorted, hummed, winked, and went tripping down the western stairs, the light of his lanterns swaying from the walls in a warmglow wash as he descended.
Such was Guest Gulkan's first encounter with Yubi Das Finger, a citizen of the Empire of Greater Parengarenga, and a resident of the far-distant city of Dalar ken Halvar.
Descending the stairs, the stranger began to sing. Abruptly, his song was cut off by a lurching cry. There was a pause. A scream! In panic, Guest sprinted to the head of the stairs, his sword already in his hand.
Then upward from the depths below there came a bright and bell-clear laugh, a laugh both generous and mocking at the same time, and Guest knew himself to have been the victim of a joke.
Sweating and blood-pounding – in the aftermath of his influenza, he was far too weak to enjoy such a joke! – Guest seated himself in his armchair. But no sooner had he settled himself than he heard more footsteps descending in the east.
Though the Hall of Time was a full hundred paces in length, though Guest Gulkan was seated near its western end, he clearly heard two people descending the stairs in the east. He got the disconcerting impression that the jade-green demon of the east was amplifying the sound of those descending footsteps. He tried to dismiss the thought, but the thought proved reluctant to be dismissed.
– It is but a stone.
Thus thought Guest, who had been seriously disconcerted by his encounter with Yubi Das Finger, and did not think himself up to the stress of facing further shocks.
Down came two people. They passed on either side of the coldglowing demon and proceeded toward Guest Gulkan at a measured pace, the lattermost carrying a bablobrokmadorni stick bright with twin lanterns.
As they came near, Guest saw the foremost was an ancient featherweight of an Ashdan, who was followed by a ragged servant.
More strangers. Guest braced himself for jokes, threats or revelations, but the pair gave him only the most cursory of glances before exiting from the hall, taking the stairs which led downwards. Guest was relieved that the passage of the dwarf-statured Ashdan and his lowbrowed bablobrokmadorni servant had gone off so smoothly.
Then: More footsteps!
Coming down!
And there were many of them!
Yes, there was no mistaking it!
A great body of armed men was coming down the eastern stairs, their armor clanking, boots tramping, horns blowing, shields clashing. Horses! They had horses! Guest heard hoofs on stone, heard an animal whinny. And – barrels! They were rolling barrels as they came! The barrels were thumping on the steps! And – one burst! Guest heard it shatter to a gust of liquid, heard curses, guttural swearing.
Now Guest was under the impression that the seventh and last stratum of the mainrock Pinnacle – Jezel Obo, the Sky Stratum – was a small place. No place, then, where one could hide a bootshod army with its horses, its shields, its barrels.
Yet they were coming downstairs!
From where?
From the sky!?
In something of a panic, Guest hastened across the skull- pattern tiles of the Hall of Time, his heart swift-hammering, his sword in his hand.
The sounds of the descending army grew louder and louder as he hurried to the eastern stairs. Would he have to challenge him?
No, they had leave to pass. Unless the demon said otherwise! Would it say? And if it did – would Guest have to hold an army singlehanded? But the demon could bite! Sod said so. It could bite, it could kill, it could gullet down men. Men? Well, a man. Maybe. But – an army?
In a boil of fearful anticipating, Guest braved himself to the eastern stairs… only to have the noise of the onslaughting army fade, melt, diminish, then echo away to nothing, vanishing into silence even as he reached the eastern end of the hall. Guest stood sweating, his heart pounding. He shook his head, half-convinced he had suddenly lost the power of hearing. But his hearing was clear enough. He could hear his own breathing, could hear a subtle wind-whine as a draught from the Swelaway Sea penetrated the Hall of Time through the high-vented slit windows.
Despite the cold of the night air, a bead of hot sweat rolled down Guest's forehead.
He thought he heard – faintly, distantly – a cold and desolate laugh.
"What is going on here?" said Guest, harshly, addressing the demon Jocasta in the Eparget of the Yarglat.
But the demon made no reply.
The demon in question was, as previously indicated, an entity firmly incarnated in a square-cut jade-green pillar, this pillar being an imposing monolith which stood twice the height of a man.
The pillar glowed with its own cold inner light – not a white light like that of ever-ice, but a green light hinting of deepwater depths. The demon, Icaria Scaria Iva-Italis by name, was Guardian Prime and Keeper of the Inner Sanctum, the holy of holies of the Bank. Iva-Italis had been in the service of the Safrak Bank for generations, and had long had charge of the Guardians.
The Weaponmaster Guest should by rights have been intimidated by such an august personage, but was not. Unfortunately, Guest had yet to acquire a mature respect for the Holy and the Unholy, the Hallowed and the Unhallowed, and as far as he was concerned the demon was just a hunk of rock. In truth, the young Weaponmaster in his ignorance thought this lump of rock to be incapable of speech, thought and action, believing rather that the powers attributed to the glowing stone were but idle tales fabricated to intimidate the ignorant.
Yet -
Yet something had made that noise of an army.
"What is it?" said Guest, questioning the rock. "What was it?
Ghosts?"
But nobody answered him.
He started to feel foolish.
He had been sick, had he not? He had. Even now he was weak in the aftermath of his fever. He was alone, and a man alone hears voices. So
… well…Guest turned away from the demon and started the long trek back to his armchair.
Then someone spoke his name.
"Guest Gulkan."
The voice was deep, dark, cavernous. A voice of roiling stone and flensing steel. A voice of sulphurous flames and bone-grinding appetites. At the sound of it, Guest halted. His flaring nostrils endeavored to gape still wider. His hair, that part of it which was not firmly matted to his skull by the dedicated accumulation of filth, endeavored to stand on end.
With eyes wild, with the agitated whip-crack intemperance of a highly-strung horse about to panic and bolt, Guest turned to face the demon.
"You!" said Guest, challenging the jade-green block of glowing stone. "Is it you?"
"Who else?" said the voice.
This time there was no mistaking the source of that voice.
The jade-green monolith was speaking to him. Guest Gulkan was being directly addressed by a demon – by Icaria Scaria Iva-Italis,
Keeper of the Inner Sanctum and Guardian Prime.
"What do you want?" said Guest, trembling on the edge of a one-man stampede.
"I want you," said the demon. "Come here!"